Nexus 6 Review

I've had my Nexus 6 for about two months now and I love it. I was a bit skeptical because I only bought it for the unlocked bootloader and developer support. Which means I was also getting a phone codenamed "Shamu" that was facing numerous issues with encryption and memory leaks and weird screen problems. I was the most disappointed person in the room when Google announced the 6" monstrosity that is the Nexus 6. I put off by a lot of the news with the specs because it became apparent that Google might actually care about sales for once. Regardless, I am one of few customers who value their level of tinkering over everything else about the phone. To be honest if the Nexus 5 worked on Verizon I'd have bought it instead because I would have a smaller phone that I could still tinker with despite it being a year old. All of this considered I really like this phone, more than I

thought I would.

Specs

OS: Android 5.1 Lollipop

Display -

     Size: 6"

     Resolution: 1440x2560p QHD

     Tech: AMOLED

Camera - 

     13 megapixels

     4K video capable

     2 Megapixel front facing

Hardware - 

     SoC: Qualcomm Snapdragon 805

     Processor: Quad Core Krait 450 - 2.7 Ghz

     Memory: 3GB

     GPU - Adreno 420

     Storage - 32GB or 64GB

Battery - 3220mAh

Wireless Qi Charging - Yes

Bluetooth - 4.1

WiFi - 802.11 a, b, g, n, ac

USB - 2.0 micro

Can be used on any carrier with any radio type.

Qualcomm Turbo Char
ging 2.0

Source: Phone Arena

Beyond the Specs

There is no point in denying that most people reading this review want to know how it feels in the hand and is it too big. I'll try to keep my opinion out of the in-depth parts and will signal when we get to that. The best way for me to help anybody considering this phone is to tell you what to expect and hopefully give the best description of what the phone is like.

Too Big?

Coming from anything but a Note is going to require a lot of adjusting. Just as a disclaimer I don't have big man hands, I can't even palm a basketball (I'm close though), however I have long fingers, if you were to buy me a pair of gloves you'd get a men's medium. So I don't have small hands but I also don't have huge glove-like hands either. The phone is large, I find myself moving my hand around on the phone a lot when using with one hand. So I'll shimmy my hand up and down to reach different parts of the phone and I "can" reach the whole phone but reaching to pull a menu in from the left is a chore. The little dimple on the back of the phone where the Motorola logo is actually a functional part of the phone, your finger naturally rests inside it and it makes holding the phone easier and you don't feel like it is going to slip around. Additionally the back is rounded nicely which also makes the size a bit easier to handle. The sides of the device are nice and smooth, the glass curves off the screen and makes the edges nice and rounded. 

Courtesy of Phone Arena

I've had numerous situations where the phone has fallen out of my pocket, however with the changing seasons and moving to shorts the pockets are different than my jeans. Phone barely fits in a jean pocket, and barely means it sticks out just a tiny bit in my jeans. It takes getting used to for sure, and I can't pretend that I don't miss a smaller device. If you're thinking about this phone and the size is worrying you then make sure you consider why you want the Nexus 6 over anything else. I believe that treating the size as a deal breaker is very reasonable and something people should consider before getting this phone. In my usage so far I've found myself doing certain tasks differently because the phone is so big I need both hands to wield it. Personally, I'd go back to my smaller screen if I could keep everything else about the phone, the phone is too big for me.

Size Isn't Everything

I committed a crime by starting this review talking about the size of the phone and now I have the task of convicing you that its still worth your time and money to get one. The specs are at the beginning so I won't make a theatric about them here, just tell you in real life how these specs turn into a great experience. 

Smooth Smooth Smooth

Everything about the interface is smooth a silk. Opening apps, multitasking, multimedia, and games are all very smooth. Something I haven't experienced in a while with my old phone. Admittedly I turned off encryption but I left it on for a week and as of Android 5.1 the buzz on the web has been the experience is much smoother. I cannot say from experience what kind of slowdown encryption first caused initially but I didn't notice any difference turning it off. There have been many improvements to the way encryption works and as far as that issue goes, consider it fixed not only because performance is better but you can now disable it without root.

Since I do root my phone I can fine tune performance and improve or in some cases degrade my experience. The most encouraging thing I found regarding how smooth the phone is how it handles all these tasks without wasting tons of battery. A phone with a Snapdragon 805 should be smooth, if it isn't that's a problem, however even if it is smooth if it has to jack the CPU and GPU up to 100% and drain the battery then your phone dies sooner. The Nexus 6 can perform perfectly well with less resources than already allocated to it. For example my Nexus 6 will only hit 1.5Ghz instead of the possible 2.7 and I never have problems with the most demanding apps. It is a well built phone and can handle big and small without battery drainage. 

The Best of Android

For the longest time I've been wanting a Nexus device. All the cool mods and development happens on them and overall I am a big proponent of a vanilla or close to experience. With that said the Nexus 6 with Lollipop is really cool. I was fortunate that developers were able to bring Android 5.0 to the Galaxy SIII so I had experience with it but it was far from smooth and stuff didn't work all the time. Now I have the latest and everything works really well. Being on stock Android has never been better these days with Ambient Display and Always-Listening being baked into the OS now. Formerly these features were a Motorola exclusive but now they are for everybody to enjoy.

Camera

I'm not much of a photo guy and my experience with smartphone cameras has been less than stellar so anything new these days is probably going to look good to me. With that said the Nexus 6's camera is pretty good. I use the Google Camera and almost always have HDR turned on to get the best photos. The impressive part is the low light quality which is easily the best I've seen. 

I took a few pictures and I did edit them, which isn't cheating in my opinion because I'm telling you straight up. The auto-enhance feature mostly turned up the saturation to get the colors to pop better. The reason I chose to stick to the enhancements is due to the nature of this article. Its a review not a comparison thus I should show you what to expect from this phone if you use the same features I do. If I am comparing phones I'd turn off auto enhance but I just want to best represent the stock features of this phone to you.

Screen

The 5" QHD AMOLED screen looks amazing. Very sharp, bright, and the colors are well balanced. I wish there were a way for me to show you the quality of the screen but that is difficult to do in pictures. Regardless, I did my usual screen quality "benchmark" and watched the 4K Timescapes trailer on YouTube and wow it looks phenomenal. I use that video because it is basically a meant for showing off screens since the footage looks awesome. The experience is made even better with the high quality sound. Both ends of the phone have a front facing speaker giving you stereo sound. Let me start off by saying, yes, it makes a difference having two speakers. The phone gets very loud and music and videos sound good. They may not be Boomsound speakers but they're certainly better than my SIII's rear speaker. 

Unfortunately if you've read other reviews or news about the Nexus 6 you've likely come across the complaint that the screen gets a pink tint to it when it gets dim, this is true. However, in order to really see that pink color you have to dim your screen further down than adaptive brightness will. At this point the screen is extremely dim and nice when you're in bed but that's about its only useful purpose. Typically you'd need a screen filter app to achieve such a dim screen which is what it likely is. Alot of phones can only dim the pixels so much until the only other way is to put a semi-transparent filter over the screen to make stuff look dimmer, this is likely the case with the Nexus 6. In my opinion I've already given this problem too much attention because it is not a dealbreaker or really anything to be concerned about. I'd chalk it up to a negligible 'issue'. 

Battery Life

This is probably the section people wanted to read the most as battery life is very important. I obsess over my battery life to the point where I constantly use BetterBatteryStats to see what is draining it. At the moment I am not on my phone very much with school going on and everything so I don't have a problem going all day without losing more than 40% battery. The most screen on time I've achieved is 6 hours which is easily the most I've ever had personally. For someone without a lot of apps to wake up the device you can easily see these numbers too. I've also seen some people get 8 hours and even 10 hours of screen on time. As always it depends on the person but you can reasonably expect 5 hours of screen on time on a normal day (for me at least).

One amazing feature I didn't think I'd really care about is Qualcomm's Turbo Charge 2.0. It has to be the most useful feature I have ever used and would have made owning the Galaxy SIII a lot easier. I can get a full charge in an hour and a half, that's right 0% to 100%. All the claims about getting 4 hours of battery in 15 minutes is true. The charger goes for 0% to 50% in half an hour (about) and then it throttles down the charging so it won't damage the battery. Interestingly it is training people to keep their phones off chargers. I never charge my phone overnight anymore because it'll be overcharging for hours so I charge during the day because it doesn't take long at all. Usually I can top it off while I get ready in the morning. Since I can't just replace the battery I want to keep it in good condition by not night charging.

Wrap Up

The Nexus 6 is a phenomenal phone and is definitely a safe bet for anybody wanting to move from a Note or other large phablets. A few other small features to mention are that this phone is available from all major carriers and since there is only one SKU for the Nexus 6 it'll work across GSM and CDMA networks which is something no other phones can do. This leads me into the next feature, it is the only phone that work on Project Fi, Google's new mobile phone service rolling out soon. VoLTE or Voice over LTE works on the Nexus 6 and as of Android 5.1 it is supported natively by Android.

I hope you enjoyed this review of the Nexus 6 from Motorola and Google. Feel free to drop me a question, feedback, or start a conversation in the comments section. As alway I take requests and want to hear what you think.